Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder, was the lead investor in a $50 million round of financing for Quora, said Charlie Cheever, the company’s co-founder. Thiel, an early investor in Facebook and Zynga, was joined by Benchmark...

While deciding on his next career move, Brad Garlinghouse asked for advice from Sheryl Sandberg, who left Google to become chief operating officer of Facebook. “She said, ‘Go with growth,’” recalled Garlinghouse, 41, who used to run AOL’s West Coast...

Amid all the entrepreneurs striving to make the next Facebook, a new accelerator program is launching to help startups become the next Box or Yammer. Starting in July, the venture capital-backed Alchemist Accelerator program will help 12 teams whose mission...

Add one more thing to the tech entrepreneur’s to-do list: file patents. Startups on small budgets have often viewed patents as an unnecessary expense because each one can cost around $15,000. But as Apple, Facebook, Google and other tech companies...

Soon after Facebook agreed to pay $1 billion for Instagram, social networking rival Twitter considered acquiring a mobile photo-sharing application called Camera+, two people with knowledge of the negotiations said. Twitter executives held several meetings with Camera+ developer Tap Tap...

Douglas Merrill, Google’s former chief information officer, has spent the past two and a half years applying technology to underwriting, with the goal of offering lower-cost loans for the millions of people with poor credit scores. Now he’s ready to help...

The IPO mini-boom that’s sweeping Silicon Valley means big bucks for the venture capital firms that made early bets on billion-dollar companies. How much money each firm is making is guesswork, because as private partnerships, the only people who see...

Tango, a startup that offers mobile video calling, has raised $40 million from investors including Qualcomm Ventures and Access Industries, the company said today in a release. The service, which lets users make video calls across Apple, Android and Windows...